The Roguelike Rule of Thumb

RULE OF THUMB (OBSERVED):

If you make a computer game "these days" and you call it a Rogue-like, and, if you are under the age of 40 to 45 (or so) then:

It is (almost certainly & nearly always) NOT A FUCKING Rogue-like!!!!!!

"Kids, get off my lawn."

I will not be taking questions. Please respect my family's wishes at this sensitive time. Thank you all for coming to my TED Talk today...

...

(Time passes... Perhaps millions of years? Certainly a few seconds which felt agonizingly like two or three minutes. Author realizes the audience has, for some bizarre reason, stuck around. Feels bad for them. Decides to throw them a bone...)

...

Ok, ok... Some elucidation...

You see 6 things before you:

1. an orange (clearly)

2. a grapefruit (or lemon)

3. a banana

4. a monkey

5. a shark

6. a Feynman QED diagram

One of the above is an ACTUAL orange.

One is clearly ORANGE-LIKE and beyond all doubt (the grapefruit or lemon.)

One would be, well... highly STRAINING the sense of the term orange-like (namely: the banana) but DOES HAVE A REASONABLE ARGUMENT for it!

The other three: if YOU call them orange-like you're either an idiot or mentally ill, at worst, or at best merely too young and naive. Either way you NEED to get off my lawn, stat!

Disclaimer and in the spirit of full disclosure: one of my old games, Dead By Zombie (from 2008-ish), is a Rogue-like in the sense of case 2 above. And my newest game, Slartboz (from 2023), is one in the sense of either 2 or (at worst) 3.

Dead By Zombie:
https://github.com/mkramlich/Dead_By_Zombie

Slartboz:
https://github.com/mkramlich/slartboz-pub

………

UPDATE:

I ended up submitting this piece to HN and it got a small discussion there. In one of the threads I stumbled across someone making a comment like (paraphrased as): "So... what makes a game Rogue-like anyway?"

I wanted to scream.

I should scream.

But... I will not.

Instead I will add this portion down here:

My answer to that sweet sweet summer child? EASY. It is... *whether* its Rogue-like!

It's self-answering. Self-contained. Thanks to the wonderful powerful of the English language! (And, long before most of y'all were born we had "books" called "dictionaries" where words had "definitions" and we learned them in "school" and "used" them. Correctly. I'd put correctly in quotes but the *meaning* of *correctness* has NOT changed since. Shocking!)

That was the literal point of this blog post of mine. Well, 1 of 2 key points. First was that if you are under a certain age you are almost always using the term wrong. Second was to walk people through a mental exercise to help them (re-) learn both the meaning of the *actual* words involved, and the relevant comparison analytics when gauging their applicability. :-)

You see... back in the 70s/80s there was Rogue. And then there were a dozen or so other computer games all clearly... like Rogue!

We, then, at that time, called them "Rogue-likes."  (I know because I myself was "there" at the time. And I myself, at least, needed useful terms for things. Back when we went from just having Rogue to then *also* having a bunch of additional games which each were *like* it. It was not a hard or esoteric phenomenon for us to grok.) Made sense! We all knew *exactly* what we were talking about then. And *nothing* has changed with either the word "Rogue" or the word "like" since.

To spell it out more concretely...

Here is the game Rogue (well, the Wikipedia entry for the 1980 commercial version by Epyx):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)

Therefore the question becomes, merely... is some game like that?

Like what, exactly?

*That.* Rogue. *Like* that.

Answer:

YES... or... NO

Though to be fair I give 6 distinct exemplar cases above, of the various shades-of-gray step nuances involved out in the real world, from the metaphorical black end of the spectrum to the white. Using *oranges* as an example.

Why oranges?

Well, we all know fruits, right? We know a grapefruit is NOT an orange and yet it is clearly orange-like? You see how the banana might strain the definition but still... it has a credible argument? You understand why calling a monkey "an orange-like" is a joke? Why calling a shark an orange-like has crossed well into the land of the utterly insane? Don't get me started on whether a Feynman diagram is anything at all like an orange. I will slap you if you get in hand's reach. :-)

Oh and "the Berlin thing" is irrelevant: it has NO more Authority than any rando hipster on the street spouting off a quote from cult propaganda. Both "Rogue" and "like" each have a concrete meaning unchanged.

To be more clear, for the kids: both permadeath and procgen are game design features independent from Rogue-likes. Permadeath was common in standup coin-op arcade games (in bricks-and-mortar "malls") and in home video console (eg. Atari 2600) cartridge-based games of ALL genres, for a DEACADE plus -- platforms where you could NOT save and restore. I also played plenty of procgen games that had nothing to do with dungeons or Terminals or ASCII. Empire! SimCity! Civ! I could go on and on and on... (Hell I even wrote a private clone of Empire once! (Imperium.) I kinda had to know how to do *procgen* for it! But it was otherwise nothing at all like Rogue.)

What was MORE interesting about Rogue, however, was that it was a kind of automated solitaire computer version of D&D!!! The dungeon delving aspects of it. Is *your* game about descending into a dungeon filled with dragons? Is it played in a Terminal? Does it use ASCII glyphs? If none of those things are true about *your* game then you probably should STFU with your Rogue-like wannabe hipster nonsense.

To be super clear:

Q: Is a game Rogue-like?
A: Is the game *like* Rogue?

DUH!

Why do I even have to step up to point this out to y'all? Sheesh.

*shakes fist at sky*

*hobbles off into the sunset, grumbling about the kids these days...*